Battle to reach customers in the shortest possible time

Logistics sees e-commerce as its main oppottunity to grow and at the same time as its biggest challenge: each time has to face more shipments of more and more types of products to more customers in more places, increasingly tight deadlines and increasingly personalized schedules. The immediacy prevailed the day Internet reduced the distance between manufacturers and buyers; and each order is a kick-start to a race against time, in which quality and speed are synonyms that have to go together.

In the battle to lead this business, logistics companies are at the same time allies and competitors of the giants of the electronic commerce, like Amazon, that increasingly bet by own mechanisms of delivery. This is, for example, the case of El Corte Inglés, which launched in December an express delivery service of its own products within two hours, and since June has added the possibility to choose the exact hour the customer wants to receive the order. Meanwhile, one of the last to join the is Ikea, which plans to expand its online store and deliver home-delivered online orders across Spain by the end of the year.

Seur, who has an agreement with Amazon, billed 150 million euros last year (25% more than in 2014) in electronic commerce, a segment that entails a quarter of its business, when in 2011 it represented 11%. It is not an isolated case because in Correos the volume has grown 16% per year since 2012. This increase in demand forces the logistics companies to resize in staff and fleets and to undertake investments in logistics centers as well as in technology and innovation.

So for example Seur intensifies its presence in a segment still emerging as the fast food delivery at home. “In the US, this market is working very well, and we believe that Spain has a great margin of growth”, says the corporate director of operations of Seur, which reveals that, following the agreement with the JustEat app, the group plans to triple its fleet of delivery agents to take food within a maximum of 40 minutes. “And everything with electric vehicles,” he says.